- Date: 1964
- Composer: Harry Somers
- Period: Modern (1910-1949)
Review
Harry Somers (b. 1925), an important Canadian composer, was hired to provide a score for a 1964 television documentary on the artist Pablo Picasso. The music mostly evoked the times and places of the artist¹s long and eventful life, and took a sense of fun from many of Picasso¹s drawings. Somers found that this music made a varied and attractive light music suite of several short movements (lasting about twenty minutes) and so subtitled the piece "light music."The opening snapshot is a brief evocation of ragtime music, which also ends the suite. The seven interior movements all represent periods or trends in Picasso¹s art, and include a kind of atonal blues for the artist¹s "blue period," circusy music for his series of paintings of clowns and other circus people, and so forth. Picasso Suite became one of Somer¹s best-known pieces. ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi
Albums with Complete Performances of the Work
| Title | Date |
| Stravinsky & Somers: Ballet Suites | 1996 |
| Picasso Portraits (3) for saxophone quartet | |
| Picasso Suite, movements (6) for violin & piano |
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